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An interview with Idea Nation
Fighting Cancer Frame by Frame
By LINDSAY BORTHWICK
Published: Thursday, December 28, 2006
From a young age, images spoke to Suley Fattah in ways that words did not. They fuelled his lively imagination, they helped him get by in countries where he didn’t speak the language, and they gave him the raw material he needed to record everyday experiences in a visual diary. It’s little surprise then that images have continued to shape his life and that he is using them to enrich the lives of others.
Fattah is the creator of Drawing the Line (DTL) and its sister publication, Drawing the Line Again (DTL2), two anthologies of comics intended to raise awareness and funds for cancer research. They retail in the Toronto area and 100% of proceeds from book sales go to The Hospital for Sick Children Foundation and the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, two causes that are close to Fattah’s heart. In 2002, during the SARS epidemic, it was Princess Margaret Hospital where Fattah was treated for lymphoma cancer. He was not yet 40.
When the treatment succeeded, Fattah began looking for a way to express his gratitude to the hospital staff and to give hope to others who were coping with the disease. His friend Ron Boyd, a Toronto-based illustrator, presented Fattah with a painting for his 40th birthday. This “simple gift of artistry and friendship,” says Fattah, inspired DTL and its image appears on the book’s cover. He then called on his community of friends and colleagues, among them the well-known French artist Moebius, to contribute pieces to the book that touched on the theme of health and well-being. The contributors jumped on board immediately, including comics legends Stan Sakai and Jean-Claude Götting. Fattah even received a submission from a German illustrator he has never met. DTL was self-published in May 2004 with the support of family, friends, and 35 contributors. DTL2 followed in April 2006, this time with a publisher, VEI Press, and 61 different artists.
The uniqueness of Fattah’s vision and the way in which he engaged the aid of his community to realize it were, no doubt, part of the attraction. But Fattah has an additional explanation. “It’s a way of making a donation that opens the door for [the artists],” he says. “My experience has been that everyone wants to give but a lot of the time the path isn’t clear.”
For him, the project also represented an opportunity to introduce more people to the art of comics or graphic novels (terms Fattah uses interchangeably to describe DTL). In recent years, many North Americans have gotten to know the work of comics artists and writers, such as Art Spiegelman, through his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Maus, or Harvey Pekar, whose life inspired the film American Splendor. Yet the genre is still considered marginal by most. “People who are buying the books don’t necessarily know about comics,” he says. DTL introduces them to an art form. It takes them away from their preconceived ideas.”
Fattah, who seems to think in visual metaphors, has often been accused of being unconventional. In fact, he credits DTL’s success and even the outcome of his cancer treatment to this trait: “What’s needed is an open attitude—the ability to observe and take things in from a detached point of view.” Moreover, he says that in both cases, “I wanted people to join me on my adventure… I viewed it as going along the street with them, arm in arm.”
Arm in arm and frame by frame, Fattah and the volunteer artists who worked on DTL have created an enviable model for giving.
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